Category Archives: Baseball

SIGNALING IN BASEBALL IS MORE SOPHISTICATED THAN ILLEGAL SIGNALING IN BRIDGE. Yesterday’s post described the illegal system used in 1965 in which two partners “were discovered using finger signals—clutching their cards variously with two, three, or four fingers, with an … Continue reading →

WHAT SABERMETRICS CAN DO IN 2016. I posted here two years ago about what changes were expected in the statistical analysis of baseball from the arrival of big data. This article by David Schoenfield on the ESPN site reports on … Continue reading →

APPLYING THE PRINCIPLES OF FORECASTING TO DANIEL MURPHY. I arrived at my forecast about Daniel Murphy by giving weight to his OPS for the last 28 days of the regular season. It was 0.854. I then reduced that figure by … Continue reading →

THE EXCITING GAME WITHOUT ANY RULES—FOR COLLISIONS AT SECOND BASE. Utley’s slide, as Brian Kenny points out in his post, was plainly in violation of the text of the applicable baseball rule, as Joe Torre found in suspending Utley for … Continue reading →

THE TROUBLE I PREDICTED HAS TURNED OUT WORSE THAN I HAD THOUGHT. In my post of two years ago about the prospect of instant replay, I said about plays at second base: “…instant replay would presumably enforce the rules as … Continue reading →

THE RULE PROBLEM AT SECOND BASE. I posted here two years about the problems that might occur with introducing replay on plays at second base and on the dangers of the collisions that were permitted on plays at second base. … Continue reading →

WHY DO UMPIRES LET CATCHERS FRAME PITCHES SO OFTEN? A year ago, I described here some of the things that catchers do to persuade umpires that a ball was really a strike. I posted here about the recent emphasis on … Continue reading →

RECOGNIZING THAT THE STRIKE ZONE HAS THREE DIMENSIONS. I posted here about misgivings I had about the accuracy of the camera and the related algorithm which are used to call balls and strikes. One reason was that the strike zone … Continue reading →